Soon, tech to detect heart attacks when one is at wheel

Scientists are developing a new system that can predict if a car driver is about to have a heart attack, a feature that would help avoid road accidents due to an unexpected cardiac event.

“A large number of traffic incidents are caused by (drivers suffering) medical conditions while driving, specifically cardiovascular events, such as myocardial infarction and myocardial ischemia,” said Kayvan Najarian, from University of Michigan in the US.

To avoid such accidents, the researchers have teamed up with Japanese automotive manufacturer Toyota to develop technology that can monitor and analyse the physiology of the driver and predict if they are going to suffer adverse cardiac events. To this end, they are creating a system that can be placed in the vehicle.

“We would like to test hardware we had previously identified, and improve and validate our algorithmic solutions to see what it will take to generate a system that could look at the physiology of a person, provided by high density electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements, as well as other medical measurements,” Najarian said.

Researchers are using machine-learning models to analyse data collected from in-hospital and in-vehicle subjects. The team plans to use heart monitors, which are patches placed on a driver’s chest, to analyse physiological data in real time, and hopes to report results in 2020.